Site Mobile Navigation

A Golden Touch That Runs in the Family

STYLING Moray Callum, left, the designer of Fords Mazda 3, and his brother, Ian Callum, right, director of design at Jaguar.Credit
Fabrizio Costantini for The New York Times; Jonathan Player for The New York Times

DUMFRIES, Scotland, is a small town near the English border that looks like its name sounds.

Growing up there in the 1960’s, Ian and Moray Callum would commandeer their mother’s typewriter and write letters to local car dealers asking for brochures on the new models. Once, their baffled father, a solicitor of modest means, received a call from a Rolls-Royce salesman inviting him for a test drive: based on the boys’ letter, the salesman thought he had a hot prospect.

Today, the Callum brothers are international stars of auto design, the equivalent in their profession of the Bush brothers in politics, the Baldwins in acting, the Mannings in football quarterbacking. For Aston Martin, Jaguar, Mazda, Ford and other marques they have created cars distinguished for emotional, sensual shapes that contrast with any idea of sensible, frugal Scotland.

After shaping the Aston Martin DB7, the 1993 successor to James Bond’s famous ride in classic films, Ian Callum, now 52, became director of design at Jaguar, for which he designed the recently released XK sports coupe and convertible. Moray, four years younger, after revitalizing the look of Mazda, a Ford subsidiary, has moved from Hiroshima, Japan, to Dearborn, Mich., where he is charged with the look of future Fords.

They have come a long way from Dumfries — and a long way from Dumfries is exactly where the boys were trying to get.

It was a place to leave, the Callums said. They spoke on a conference call linkup recently. Ian was in Coventry, England, at Jaguar’s design studio and Moray was in Dearborn. “It was like the little town in the film ‘American Graffiti’ — but without the hot rods,” Ian Callum said.

The boys’ mother, Sheila Callum, 77, who still lives in Dumfries, recalls that they shared a room. “It was covered with automobile brochures.”

Mrs. Callum said both boys drew pictures of cars from their earliest years. Later, she said, a teacher at their school told her, “ ‘Ian is drawing cars all the time.’ ”

The boys looked for exotic cars on the high street. When they saw their first car with electric windows, they made the driver demonstrate them over and over.

Occasionally, Mrs. Callum said, they would get to a racetrack where the Scottish drivers Jackie Stewart and Jim Clark raced. “Jim Clark was Ian’s hero.”

When he was 14, in 1968, Ian wrote a letter to Jaguar, and William Heynes, the company’s legendary head of engineering, expressing his interest in designing sports cars. He received a gracious reply and advice: study engineering and work hard.

Ian made it out of Dumfries first, to the Glasgow School of Art, where he began studying industrial design in 1972. It was not a good time for the automobile. The British car industry was imploding. “And this was the time of the energy crisis,” he recalled. “People were shooting each other at petrol stations. We were discouraged from even thinking about automobile design.”

“We both drew cars, but Moray actually got cars first,” Ian said. Ian had a Volkswagen Beetle, but never could get it to run. “Then I got engaged and sold the car for a ring.” (He is married today, with two sons.)

Ian attended the Royal College of Art in London, which was then becoming the leading automobile design program in the world. He went to work for Ford in 1979 in studios in Australia, Japan, Germany and Turin, Italy, in the Ghia studio. He went to TWR, a design consultancy, where he got a big break: TWR was called on to design a new car for Aston Martin, which was languishing. The result, in 1993, was the DB7. Ian brought an early example home to show his mother. It stuck out of the family garage.

In 1999, when Geoff Lawson, the veteran Jaguar design director, died suddenly of a stroke, the Ford design chief, J Mays, asked Ian to take over the job.

Moray went through school as “Ian’s little brother.” “We do tend to adopt the interests of our big brothers,” Moray said. “I tried to avoid doing what he did, but in many ways we were similar. I have him to blame for being a car designer.”

Moray recalled that he drew animals before he drew cars. “For a while the family said I was going to become a veterinarian,” he said. His mother noted something else: She saw him as an architect, and soon, so did he. He went to study the subject at Napier University in Edinburgh.

“Architecture was my mother’s idea really,” he said. “But I found myself calculating the size of a waste pipe for a seven-story building and I realized I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life doing that.” He switched to industrial design, and then, after an internship at a car company, followed Ian to the Royal College of Art for his master’s degree in transportation design.

After graduating in 1982, he was hired by Chrysler and worked for Peugeot-Citroën before joining the design house Ghia, which did a lot of work for Ford, advising on Jaguar and Aston Martin. Moray was hired by Ford in 1995 and sent to Dearborn. He worked on pickup trucks and minivans — and a face lift of the Taurus family sedan. He lent the soft-looking Taurus a sporting touch by providing it with a grille reminiscent of the classic E type Jaguar of 1961.

That project led to another letter that is part of the Callums’ legend. When Ian’s new Jaguar sports coupe, successor to the iconic XK8, was unveiled at the Detroit auto show in 2005, critics commented on the resemblance of the luxury car’s grille, an elliptical aperture with a chrome bar bearing a logo, to that of Moray’s humble Taurus, not to the classic Jaguar that inspired both designs.

After the criticism of his brother, Moray wrote a letter of apology, more or less facetiously, that Ian still displays in his office.

Time will show he was right, despite the resemblance, Ian said. “I don’t regret it, and the car is selling very well indeed,” he said.

The pressure is still on Ian. Jaguar, which depends heavily on design for its cachet, has been losing money for years. Several highly praised concept cars have never found production because of the hard times at the company. The R concept, a vision of future Jaguar style, was unveiled at the Frankfurt auto show — on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. The F type was hailed by critics but never went into production. Much is riding on the success of the XK; even more rides on the new Jaguar S-type sedan, due out next year.

At Mazda, where he took over design in 2001, Moray was also faced with replacing a touchstone model: the Miata sports car. His effort was well received. He also created a consistent look for the line, which soon enjoyed one of the lowest average-aged buyer of any brand. With crisp black interiors and red-lighted instruments, Mazdas under Moray came to share edgy shapes that were emotional and almost biological — part flame, part flower, expressive of the sporting image the company sought.

For both brothers, the challenge is to provide designs that will revive sales. At Ford, Moray is charged with shaping new passenger cars for a company criticized for dull models and dominated by trucks and S.U.V.’s. Mazda, similarly, needed designs to distinguish itself from its larger Japanese rivals, Toyota, Honda and Nissan. Jaguar needed designs to stand out from German and Japanese luxury brands as a sporty, luxurious and British marque.

Car designers are often revealed by the cars they own. Moray has many, from a boatlike Pontiac to a hot rod. Ian has an original Mini and a 1932 Ford coupe, a classic hot rod that has been under restoration for the past three years. “It’s a black highboy, fenderless,” Ian said. “It’s what I’ve always wanted. At first I wanted to put big 20-inch wheels on it. But I got ripped so much about that I have steel wheels now. ”

“Glad to hear it,” said Moray, who had been one of those doing the “ripping.”

“Car designers are drawn back to older cars, with the purity of basic engineering,” Ian said. “There’s a need to show people that it’s not all about sculpting sheet metal, that the key thing is proportion.”

Such bare-bone cars appeal to both Callums as pure engineering. “The Scottish are a nation of engineers,” Ian said. “But they are very creative engineers. They seem dour, but underneath they are quite romantic.”

The historian Arthur Herman agrees. In the best seller “How the Scots Invented the Modern World” he quotes Sir Walter Scott: “The Scottish mind was made up of poetry and strong common sense and the very strength of the latter gave perpetuity and luxuriance to the former.”